A Long Way For a Short Ride

Spring has Sprung at Cherry Springs: Here's some quick photo spam from my recent long weekend at Cherry Springs State Park up in Potter County. The weather was bright & sunny and unseasonably warm with day time highs approaching 85F. Add to that scenario some relatively low water for this time of the year along with a forest canopy that has yet to leaf out and you have all the makings for a slow weekend of freestone fly fishing.

Pine Hill Summit (El. 2175') - PA Route 44

Pine Hill View on PA 44, aka the Coudy Pike, in Potter County. For a Flatlander, it's the last of the big blockbuster views from the plateau before you drop down into the head of the Kettle Creek Valley. The viewshed here is looking east towards the Francis Branch and Slate Run.

Cherry Springs State Park (El. 2,300') - Campground

We had originally planned to camp at Ole Bull Campground right on Kettle Creek but it seemed like everyone else had the same idea. The first really warm weekend of the year and by the time we arrived early Friday afternoon all the good sites were already taken. The campground here at Cherry Springs sits on top of a nearby mountain and is on the north side of PA 44, across from the main astronomy viewing field on the south side, but it still gets pretty dark over here too. Darker than a banker's heart.

Cherry Springs State Park - Astronomy Field

Cherry Springs is known for having some of the darkest skies in the East and is a haven for astronomers from all over the country. I think I even saw Uranus here one night. Looked like NASA was busy trying to land a probe on it.

The spring songbird migration was in full swing up here in Potter County. At night we would drift off to sleep to the incessant sound of hooting owls and each morning we were awakened by a cacophony of various songbirds and woodpeckers. Overnight lows hovered around a balmy 52F.

Boone Run Vista

Here we're looking southeast down Boone Run towards Cross Fork Creek then eventually the Kettle Creek Valley in the distance.

Cross Fork Creek - Potter County, Pa.

Cross Fork Creek looked refreshingly cool in the sizzling heat but the afternoon fishing produced scant rewards -a few small brook trout that if you lined them all up nose to tail would barely make one respectable sized brown trout. A long way to go for a short ride, indeed.

Yours truly releases another small but hungry brook trout that just couldn't resist rising to a Hendrickson dry fly. While this wasn't a serious fly fishing trip by design, and we only fished one stream for an abbreviated amount of time, we had certainly hoped to move a few larger fish while we were there. Such are the whimsical vagaries of trout fishing, I guess.

Doing more fishing than catching on Cross Fork below the mouth of Elk Lick Run. What the hay, at least it wasn't winter anymore and minus -17 degrees outside like it was this past January.

Lone White Pine & Black Cherry Trees- Cherry Springs State Park

Cherry Springs State Park is named for the large stands of black cherry trees that surround the headwater springs for Hopper House Hollow Run in the 48 acre park, which itself is entirely surrounded by the 262,000 acre Susquehannock State Forest.

CCC Log Picnic Pavilion in Grove of White Pine

This unusual pavilion, built by the Civilian Conservation Corp in 1939, has two large covered dining areas with huge fireplaces surrounded by log and chink walls and connected by a common breezeway. It's on the south side of route 44, adjacent to the astronomy viewing field.

All the water that will ever be is, right now.
- National Geographic, October 1993

April Blues

"April, come she will
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain"
-Paul Simon

Big Fishing Creek

In the back of my mind I thought to myself; "This weekend is gonna be too good to be true". The weather was delightful, but boy was it slooooow fishing. Sure, we caught a few fish, but our expectations were set a little higher for our first big camping/fishing trip of the year. We had good weather, good water (perhaps too good) and what amounted to unrestrained enthusiasm as we rounded the bend on Big Fishing Creek in the Narrows at 11:00 a.m. only to have our windshields nearly sandblasted by an explosive hatch of grannom caddis or Brachycentrus numerousi -the first super hatch of the young season.

Glen & Greg G, Mike Bowman and yours truly had made plans to spend a few days fishing to a magic elixer of April hatches while camping out at Poe Paddy State Park and living like modern day mountain men. Sometimes though, despite even the best laid plans, things can & do go wrong.

The Narrows

Big Fishing Creek was bank full of ice cold water from recent spring rains. If you rolled down your window from the gravel parking lot you could hear the creek making noises, like it was talking to itself about things it had seen further upstream. Big Fishing Creek has always been a sentimental favorite with me for fishing the Hendrickson's since it was here, a little over 25 years ago, that I caught my first wild brown trout on a cut-winged Red Quill (Hendrickson) fly that I tied myself.


A classic grannom scenario was about to play itself out. An unfathomable amount of caddis flies were everywhere; in the air, on the water, on the back of your neck, in your mouth, in your eyes, in the trees & bushes and bouncing around on the lens of your camera -but all day long, not one rising fish was spotted until finally some returning egg laying adults brightened up Mike's afternoon.

It was such a glorious day that I didn't even lament the lack of rising activity too much. We'll just go to work on nymphing up a few caddis eaters with deep running larva/pupa imitations from Flatlander Flies© then relax and enjoy the fine spring day. While the nymph fishing was hardly fast & furious it was extremely satisfying for producing two fine fish that were both in excess of 15 inches (one was closer to 20" than 15"). I suck at taking solo fish pix and I ruined the photo-op on both fish by fumbling with my $10 disposable camera that I carry with me everywhere I go.

Around 3:00 p.m. a decent number of Hendrickson duns, aka Ephemerella subvaria, sallied forth and provoked even less interest from the trout than the grannoms did. One glaring omission from the parade of flies this day was the absence of any Blue Quill or Paraleptophlebia adoptiva mayflies either on the water or in the air.

The sun was already starting to hide behind the mountains to the west of the Narrows when Glen & I went looking for Mike so we could make the drive over to Poe Valley and set up camp for the evening. Lucky Mike, when we finally found him he had stumbled onto a pod of trout rising to adult grannom egg layers that kept him occupied with a one last brief flurry of activity on this brilliant spring day in central Pennsylvania.

Looking South from Nittany Mountain towards Rebersburg, Pa.

I view this bucolic scene every time I make the drive from the Sugar Valley over to Brush Valley. At one time in the very distant past, the ridge where I am standing when I took this photo and the one across the valley were both slopes on opposites sides of the same huge mountain. The summit of that prehistoric mountain is now the valley floor that you see in front of you. Funny thing that geology.

Poe Paddy Campground - After Dark

Eat - Sleep - Drink - Fish

For tomorrow will be yet another beautifully brilliant spring day. And one loaded with lots of piscatorial promise. After all, I was up here just 2 short weeks ago and I couldn't keep the trout off of my flies.

Poe Paddy - First Light

Couldn't sleep either; swarms of Hendrickson spinners were hitting the tent all night long as they flew upriver.

Nymphing Penn's at 1,000 CFS - Sounds Like a Plan!

...A sure thing if there ever was one. At least according to that Wade Rivers guy -who by the way, I think, is still snoring in his tent as usual. He claims to have fought with Chief Logan and has been fishing Penn's for 30 years now and has got her figured out just like a woman; gentle & forgiving or powerful and stern. Either way today's grannom/Hendrickson fishing should be just like taking candy from a baby.

Camp Karoondinha

"Limit your kill
Don't kill your limit"

We won't have to worry about those words of wisdom today.

The Braids

Another one like the other one as far as days go this weekend. Although this one is with even less success under the same set of conditions. It's really hard to complain when you are basking in warm, sunny 70 degree temperatures on Penn's Creek after a brutally long cold winter, but I was really starting to get the fishin' blues from swinging my Grays all day long without much interest on the fishes part. Later in the day a heavy hatch of Hendricksons carpeted the water as far as the eye could see. From the Broadwater Pool to the to Clay Banks and Blue Rock to Butter Rock, if you didn't know any better you'd think you were witnessing a blanket hatch on the famous Henry's Fork in I-dee-a-ho. But not one single flippin' fish rose in that onslaught of 900 CFS, 50F greenish-brown limestone slurry they call Penn's Creek. Two days of hard fishing here and I have one fish to show for it, the other guys faired little better.

The Braids #2

This May will mark my 30th year of fishing, camping, hiking and exploring the superb Penn's Creek Watershed. I dunno whether it was bright sunshine or bad angling skills that put the trout off the feed this weekend, but I still find it every bit as enigmatic and entertaining now as I did back in 1979. In some aspects it's even better today; We now have an additional 7 miles designated as Trophy Trout water contiguously tacked onto the original 4 miles of Catch & Release water that was created back in 1976, Ephemerella subvaria have repatriated the river above Cherry Run thanks to new sewage treatment plants coming on line in the towns of Coburn and Spring Mills, Penn's Valley Conservation Association keeps a close eye on land conservation practices and stream improvement projects now abound in a watershed that was once void of them. Heck, even Cherry Run itself has protective regulations on it and campers will soon have hot showers available to them up at Poe Valley State Park.

Wash Day on the Nairobi River?

Hardly. Although the water should now be well oxygenated from us whipping into a froth all day long. No, that's not my thumbprint on the camera lens, it's a grannom caddis fly.

Little Poe Creek - Poe Valley

Now if we could only get rid of that big solar collecting dam up on Big Poe Creek. Bring back the brookies, indeed.

Thanks to the old SSSS Boys; Glen G, Greg G and Mike B. for all the great grub, lively humor and camping camaraderie.

"June, she'll change her tune
In restless walks she'll prowl the night"